october 00 virtual c19 2020 October 15 – 18, 22 – 25 9 e Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 9 e Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists sponsored by: cover: Glenn Ligon Double America, 2012 Neon and paint 36 x 120 inches Photographer Credit: Farzad Owrang © Glenn Ligon; Image courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Thomas Dane Gallery, London. 2 virtual c19 2020 welcome to Virtual C19! october 15–18, 22–25 2020 While we wish we were gathering in Coral Gables, we are delighted to be able to hold this conference virtually, thanks to the generosity and creativity of the Penn State University IT staff, our marvelous group of Digital Conference Fellows, and hardworking colleagues from the Executive Committee and the Virtual Program Committee. It has been a long and tense six months in the shadow of Covid-19 as we dismantled one conference and built a slightly smaller version in a format that is new to all of us. We very much regret that we can’t enjoy congregating in large meeting rooms and in small gaggles, that we can’t bask in the Florida sun and feast on Cuban food, and that we won’t run into one other on our way to panels or browsing in the book exhibit. And we regret that a number of colleagues aren’t able to join us in this virtual space. But we are overjoyed to get to hear papers that we have been anticipating for months, and to be in the presence of such smart colleagues, thinking about forms of nineteenth-century dissent at such a crucial time for the practice of dissent. We couldn’t be more excited to read your abstracts, to screen your videos, and to hear you speak about your scholarship. We may be physically dispersed, but there is a powerful set of intellectual interests, traditions of thought, and spirited debates binding us to one another and to the study of nineteenth-century American literature and culture. Welcome. We’ve been waiting a long time for this! It is so very good to see you. The Program: Our current moment of national upheaval invites us to think about our conference theme, “Dissent,” in relation to a past that still affects how we live and think in our present. The panels, seminars and presentations assembled in this program remind us that the long nineteenth century was a time of political, social, and cultural volatility, marked by conflict, strife, discord, protest, and disagreement. Far from being an era of “civility,” it was an epoch of rebellion, riot, and revolution; it was an age in which social movements coincided with ideological revolt. It was also time of bodily dissent, where transgressions against gender, racial, class, and sexual norms incited both resistance and reactionary backlash. Our participants offer us ways to think through and engage these varied forms of dissent. They have also created spaces to think through dissent in scholarship and pedagogy, with work that challenges dominant or conven- tional theoretical and methodological approaches within nineteenth-century American literary and cultural studies. The Venue: As we scrambled to figure out what to do about a conference that could not be held as planned, the developers of the digital platform that we have been using for conference scheduling set about transforming their business. In record time, Ex Ordo rebuilt their site as a virtual conference space, one that enables us to screen “On Demand” content before convening, and to hear and discuss presentations in real time. We hope your experience of this conference is a good one, though attending an academic conference from home will likely take some getting used to for both audience and presenters. (We recommend pacing yourself, and taking frequent breaks!) We are very interested in feedback on your experience and will be circulating a survey in the days directly following the conference to solicit input for possible future hybrid or online conferences. We want to take a moment to recognize the remarkable and now invisible work of our Coral Gables site coordinators John Funchion and Martha Schoolman, who jumped into the breach when we had to scrap our initial plans to meet at Notre Dame. They put in countless hours organizing events, wrangling buses, and making certain your conference experience would be a good one. We will rely on their work when we return to Coral Gables, but they are this conference’s secret benefactors; we owe them profound thanks for their dedication to C19 and for their willingness to give conference hosting another try in 2022. 4 virtual c19 2020 We have relied throughout this transition on the intellectual generosity and technical skills of Penn State’s digital pedagogy faculty and staff. Ad hoc PSU site coordinator Hester Blum and project manager Miriam Gonzales are grateful to Kevin Conaway (Director of Digital Pedagogy and Scholarship for the Penn State College of the Liberal Arts) and Marc Kepler (Technology Consultant for Information Technology) for their superb virtual event and digital pedagogy counsel. The Nittany Lion Inn may have been repurposed for classroom use in this calamitous fall (after being considered for quarantine space), but we at Penn State look forward to seeing C19 return to State College for a future in-person conference. Meredith McGill Jennifer James Hester Blum president (2018-20) program chair site coordinator Land Acknowledgment: Penn State’s University Park campus is located on the unceded lands of the Susquehannock. But PSU’s occupation of Indigenous lands has been enabled by the seizure of Native homelands outside of Pennsylvania, as well. The university was established by the Morrill Act as a land-grant institution. According to an article on “Land-Grab Universities” in High Country News, “Pennsylvania State University’s 780,000-acre grant...came from the homelands of more than 112 tribes, including the Yakama, Menominee, Apache, Cheyenne-Arapaho, Pomo, Ho-Chunk, Sac and Fox Nation and Klamath. The land was acquired by the United States for approximately $38,000 and included land seizures without compensation. The windfall netted Penn State more than $439,000 — about $7.8 million, when adjusted for inflation. Penn State’s grant is connected to 50 land cessions cast across 16 states” (see Robert Lee and Tristan Ahton, “The Land Grant Universities Still Profiting Off Indigenous Homelands”). We will take some time at the Opening Reception on Thursday, October 15 to reflect on this history. We encourage you to investigate the history of the land on which your institution rests; resources for beginning such inquiries can be found at “Honor Native Land: A Guide and Call to Acknowledgement.” 5 dissent Conference access: All panels and roundtables and most of our Special Events will be held on the Ex Ordo platform, which can be accessed at event.c19conference2020.exordo.com. Seminars, which are restricted to seminar members, will be held on Zoom. Those who have registered for the conference will be sent Zoom links for those Special Events that will be held on the Penn State Zoom platform. Two principles to keep in mind for this virtual conference: There will be glitches. It’s just a matter of where and when. We’ll do our best to fix them, but please be patient as we figure things out. Take it easy on one another. Please be as generous as possible with each other as we navigate this new world and this new medium for intellectual exchange. Interactive connections: Please use the hashtag #virtualC19 when tweeting about the conference. Take it to the Slack! Our Digital Conference Fellows will have their hands full closing down each panel before starting the next one, so we encourage participants to wrap up their sessions at the specified time and to take their conversations to our Slack channel: c19americanists.slack.com Contents: 8 Special Events 10 Thursday, October 15 10 Friday, October 16 21 Saturday, October 17 33 Sunday, October 18 42 Thursday, October 22 42 Friday, October 23 53 Saturday, October 24 65 Sunday, October 25 Special Events: Celebration of Authors: Saturday, October 17, 5:30-6:30 pm Cluster Lunches: Sponsored by the Center for American Friday, October 16 Literary Studies, Penn State. 12:15-1:15 pm. Prof. Sean Goudie (Director, CALS) Join C19 members who share will give a toast to kick us off and scholarly interests at an informal lunch- celebrate the accomplishments of all the time gathering. authors. We’ll then proceed to a social hour of Zoom mixing and mingling Archives, with pre-circulated recipes for C19 cock- martin delany stage tails and mocktails, and a slideshow Critical Childhood Studies, featuring information and conference thomas eakins stage discount codes for all the books featured at the event. Environmental Studies, frances harper stage zoom link will be sent to all conference registrants Hemispheric / Transnational Studies, george lippard stage Members’ Meeting (formerly known as the Business Meeting): Affinity Group Lunches: Sunday, October 18 Saturday, October 17 12:30-1:15 pm. 12:15-1:15 pm. main stage Join similarly situated Join the 2018-20 C19 Executive Committee C19 members at an informal for a general meeting of C19 members. lunchtime gathering. We will review the accomplishments and Community College Faculty Network challenges of the past two years and martin delany stage open the floor for questions and comments. All members are welcome. Americanists Abroad ida tarbell stage Roundtable in Memory G19: Graduate Student Collective of Amy Kaplan main stage hosted by the University of Pennsylvania English Department Sunday, October 18 5:00-6:30 pm. Please register here for this event ahead of time.